Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Blog Page 944

Christ Church hall catches fire

Tony Diver
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5
Christ Church hall catches fire

Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue service were called this morning to Christ Church hall, after a hot plate used to serve food caught fire.

It is not known how serious the blaze was, but four fire engines were called to attend, and smoke could be seen issuing from the windows to Tom Quad.

According to the Christ Church custodian, the fire was put out shortly before 2pm after burning for roughly an hour.

One member of hall staff told Cherwell, “we didn’t see any fire but there was a lot of black smoke”.

Ali Hussain, Christ Church JCR President, said, “it’s a shame that our beloved and historic hall is on fire. I hope no one was hurt.”

Felix Westerén, a second year PPEist who was in the area at the time, said, “I’d just left the stairs coming out of hall when the fire alarm started. Hopefully there will be dinner tonight, but it doesn’t look like it.”

In an email to students at the college, Pauline Linieres-Hartley, the Steward of Christ Church, stated: “A quick update that it has now been confirmed that the small fire in Hall was caused by an electrical fault in a hot cupboard. Thanks to the quick reaction of staff, in particular, Neil Jackson, the Hall was quickly evacuated, the fire brigade called, the fire alarm sounded and the fire contained. There will be some smoke damage but no-one was hurt and no other damage to anything apart from the hot cupboard. Our thanks to Neil and the Hall team for their quick response.”

Review: Albert Herring

Bessie Yuill
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1
Review: Albert Herring

The charm of this new version of Benjamin Britten’s 1947 opera Albert Herring lies not only in the impeccable vocal performances of the cast, but their strong overall characterisations as well. The humour of this nostalgic, parochial farce (which utilises the collective imagination’s picture of Victorian village life cleverly) depends on clear characterisation, satire and innuendo—one of the biggest laughs of the night was probably a female character’s flirtatious request for ‘a piece of best British beef’.

The set, while not overly complicated, creates clear distinctions between the different locations as well as evoking Victorian pastoral life, and—in a particularly creative touch—the cast themselves move props between scenes, entirely in character. While the orchestra tirelessly keeps a brisk, entertaining pace, the actors toil back and forth, except for a certain imperious aristocratic female character who at one point stands back and orders the others around as they carry boxes: it’s an ingenious method of keeping the audience laughing between scenes.

Maximilian Lawrie shines as the title character Albert, his clear discomfort at the enforced, emasculating title of May King building until it manifests in a captivating outburst that exhibits his outstanding voice at its best. Albert’s transformation over the course of the opera is not the only stand-out performance in the production, however: the sheer presence of Margaret Marchetti’s Lady Billows is incredible, emphasised by a majestic entrance and striking vocal performance. She works along with the three village representatives (played by Will Pate, Tara Mansfield and John Lee) and her acerbic maid Florence Pike (Sian Millet) to evaluate and dismiss the unchaste village girls in a superbly-acted scene, where the underlying social restrictions implicit in these condemnations blend with the satirical humour as seamlessly as the intersecting of the singers’ parts. Millet’s lament for ‘Country virgins, if there be such’ is particularly memorable, as the woman who has gathered rumours about every girl in town affects superior morality.

Lila Chrisp and Ivo Almond also dazzle with natural ease and chemistry, as the young couple who serve as counterpoint to the village’s moralising, Nancy and Sid. The three schoolchildren (Ellie Bray, Sofia Kirwan-Baez and Harry Gant) are equally charming, and a scene with them and Tara Mansfield’s headmistress character may send some audience members flashing back to choir practice with its brilliantly detailed satire.

Even if the speed and subtlety of the humour may seem daunting to some, this production will soon welcome and enrapture you—this perfect antidote to fifth week blues combines wit, social commentary and a beautiful score to stunning effect.

One thing I’d change about Oxford… Lectures

Safa Dar
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1
One thing I’d change about Oxford… Lectures

I’m told that, as a historian, I have no right to complain about lectures. Apparently having most of your lectures after 11am means you are living the good life. While I can confirm that 9ams sound like a horrific injustice, there is one thing about history lectures that is almost as frustrating: the lack of coordination between tutorial and lecture topics.

At first, it may seem having lecture topics unrelated to tutorial themes being covered in the same week is an efficient way of gaining a “broad overview”. But once the keen fresher goggles come off and lofty goals of “learning for the sake of learning” are forgotten amidst the onslaught of essays and accompanying crises, the thought of attending a lecture you’ll probably never write an essay on becomes less and less appealing. Soon enough your life becomes a series of daily struggles, constant internal battles and groggy calculations of the opportunity cost of wasting 3600 precious seconds that could be dedicated to an essay due in two hours.

And then there’s the guilt: whichever path you choose, you can’t escape this. Did you go the lecture? Hooray! Now you can bin the notes you halfheartedly scrawled a year later without ever having looked at them. Did you skip it? Congratulations, not only are you wasting your money, but your noble intentions of “working” probably ended in an (un)satisfying nap and you can now be doubly haunted by an essay crisis and a guilty conscience to boot. Lucky you.

But, really, what’s wrong with broadening your academic horizons, you ask? There wouldn’t be any harm in attending an unrelated lecture or two if it was actually useful. Even someone as lazy as myself occasionally jumps at the chance for actual contact hours. Instead, what you often get is an unhelpfully vague and general conglomeration of random information which makes very little sense to the uninformed audience.

Why there shouldn’t be a General Election in 2017

Maxim Parr-Reid
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0
Why there shouldn’t be a General Election in 2017

With Conservative MPs quitting and the High Court ruling against the government, some may think that Theresa May should call an early General Election. This would be an unwise move, despite favourable poll ratings and strong conditions for the Conservatives.

Governments are loathed to call General Elections they might lose. With the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, this has the effect of producing a more volatile political environment. The path to exiting the European Union is far from clear, and an early general election is not wise due to the three-fold divisions within the country over whether we should have a “soft Brexit” or “hard Brexit”

The economy is also in a turbulent position. It’s quite possible that there could be a strong reaction to Brexit in Conservative seats that voted heavily for Remain (seats in urban conurbations for example, where the electorate are decidedly more liberal than the Brexit-supporting Tories of the shires). There was a similar metropolitan backlash against the Labour Party over the Iraq War in 2005, and it is conceivable that a snap election could enable the Liberal Democrats to reclaim their Southwest London wedge lost in 2015.

An early election would force Theresa May to declare her hand (effectively giving a “running commentary” on negotiations and exit strategies). This would split the cabinet and party into supporters of “soft Brexit” (remaining in the Single Market) and hard Brexit (leaving the EU and the Single Market entirely). Anti-Brexit parties could gain political capital by taking advantage of this obvious divide. If the government were to lose its majority in the House of Commons due to a rebellion from Remain voters, then the country could be in a far worse position.

The Labour Party would surely be reliant on the Scottish National Party to govern, and the consequence of this could be a very limited Brexit due to Scotland’s support for remaining in the European Union. Such a government may even have to commit to a second referendum on Scottish independence or a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom. This would effectively mean the almost complete Balkanisation of the UK which would be without a strong government.

Opinion polling can be highly misleading. It’s worth remembering that prior to the 2010 General Election the Conservatives had towering leads in the polls but failed to win the General Election due to the strength of the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats in their bid to be the party of the 48 per cent who voted Remain in June’s referendum could once again deprive the Conservatives of office.

It is far better for the government to see out its five year term, complete the process of leaving the European Union and go to the country in 2020 on a manifesto based around completion of the process of Brexit. This would also allow the Scottish Conservatives to strengthen their position as the main party opposing Scottish independence. The stability of a full term of one government is clearly evident, one only has to regard the coalition’s stability and the economic growth that coincided with it for evidence that such continuity is of utmost importance.

Art review: Unreported Worlds

Ellie Siora
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0
Art review: Unreported Worlds

There was something appropriately humble about the exhibition space of the Barn Gallery of St. John’s College. Its recently lacquered pine hardwood floors and quiet, off-white walls reminded me of a local parish centre whose similar walls fondly watched over many twelve year olds’ birthday parties and school discos. It seemed a rather apt modesty of a space to emphasize the framed photographs lining the walls were unquestionably worthy of someone’s complete attention.

Curated by contributing photographer Uwe Ackerman, Unreported Worlds: Seeing the Overlooked at St. John’s Barn Gallery was definitely worth undivided and meticulous attention. Meant to explore the unexplored, the exhibition ventured to depict a variety of previously unseen cultures. The six contributing photographers’ work spans the cultures of the Middle East, Eurasia, East Africa and Central America with a coherent artistic skill that simultaneously highlights the breath-taking idiosyncrasies of these cultures, yet leaves an overarching impression that we are viewing singular components of what it means to be universally human.

Ackerman himself worked to present the beautiful banalities of Haitian culture, capturing moments stumbled across during conservation work with the Seamark Trust. His curation of the rest of the exhibition includes sibling teachers Saeedeh and Saeed Kouhkan and shopkeeper Ehsan Mortazavi who—through their own amateur lens—seek to capture their community in Behbahan, Iran in an effort to cause a ripple of influence for the better. Similarly, we have the chance to view Beirut through local photography student Rami Maassarani. Although claiming to explore the consciously “foreign”, Unreported Worlds avoids being suffocatingly quintessential in its portrayal of the ‘exotic’ culture.

We see a young child, perched like a bird ready for flight on her fathers shoulders, in a full delicately rose-printed hijab (‘Girl and Veil’, Mortavazi). Next to this photograph another young girl’s face, darker with salt-stained braids and a slightly older and more quizzical expression (‘In Presque Isle’, Ackermann). Yet, these images are far too personal to merit any sort of generalisation. They are of two little girls, but they are not both of “a little girl”, rather simply “this little girl” on two separate, individual occasions. Thus, the exhibition of unreported worlds acts as a snapshot moment of the world’s kaledeioscopic plural personality that could not allow the ‘her’ of either of these images to simply be ‘the Other’.

The diversity of these images are not only commendable for their honest acknowledgment of the welcome fragmentation of the world’s identity. They are equally commendable for presenting a holistic image of a culture within itself, furthering the complexity of unknown cultures rather than their misunderstanding. These photographers cut, image to image, from the everyday ritual of Halva making—with women laying out slices of the desert on a baking-papered round tray as if they were sea shells decorating the sand—to the celebration of the Day of Ashura, whose pictorial representation speaks microcosmically of the conflict between the Sunni and the Shia Muslims (both images by Saeed Koukkan).

Bharat Patel draws out the sensations of his images—the dust that dances around feet, the hard Ethiopian sunlight that clogs the air and the sharp whipping of a slender stick cutting from sky to earth—to leave the emotional impression we must relate to in order to understand the whipping ritual of the Hamar tribe girls. It is spectacular and it is hair-raising.

Each symbol placed, on clothing, hair or skin is pivotally planned for this moment. Equally, however, Patel presents the more magically mundane moments of the same culture. A man stands alone—his stance is not symbolic, nor foreign, yet just as sensational. He simply ponders his own questions as the dry grass gently whispers around him. The photographers of Unexplored Worlds present a multi-faceted nature to the peoples they depict, crumbling any impression of stereotype and leaving only generalising similarity.

Half of the contributors are ‘subjects’ of these very same cultures. Through the lens of the Kouhkans and Mortazavi we see the ‘real’ Behbahan. Although set against the unfamiliar backdrop of the Zagros Mountains or against Imamzadeh shrines, their expressions and interactions remain familiar through the camera of an assimilated photographer.

Saeedeh Kouhkan’s depictions of the all-girls school she teaches at spoke of the same dynamics I knew and loved during my secondary education: the shared conversation between new-found female friendship caught on camera as a moment belonging to that specific situation, but still not an unfamiliar moment at that.

Rewind: Disney’s Fantasia

Bessie Yuill
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0
Rewind: Disney’s Fantasia

Disney’s Fantasia debuted on Wednesday 19th November, 1940: the company’s third feature-length animated film. Originally conceived as a short film of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ to showcase Mickey, costs ballooned to such an extent that it was decided to make several animated sections based on classical music. This was wildly experimental in comparison to the fairy tales Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, and the humorous cartoons their rivals at Warner Bros. or Metro-Goldwyn Mayer were producing. Incredibly, there was no narrative carrying through the whole film, and some parts of the film did not even have their own individual stories—instead, Disney animated abstract shapes and colours that reflected the music in a kind of kids’ film synaesthesia.

There were also shocking elements in the actual content of the film. The female centaurs in the mythological ‘Pastoral Symphony’ section were originally topless. Bacchus is clearly, if maybe unsurprisingly, drunk off godly wine, and in the incredible feat of animation ‘Night on Bald Mountain’, the villain is essentially a Satan stand-in. The element that would probably be found most scandalous today, however, is a centaur portrayed as half-young black girl and half-donkey who waits on the other white centaurs, polishing their hooves and grooming their tails. This derogatory stereotype is ‘Sunflower’, and is maybe the most egregious example of disturbing racial shorthand in Disney’s canon that has been later swept under the carpet: she was edited out of all versions past 1969, disappearing like Disney’s slavery-based family film Song of the South.

Outside of that ugliness the film succeeds as an experimental portrayal of sound, although the original plans to create a series were scrapped due to the high costs of ‘Fantasound’ technology significantly outweighing the film’s profit. It experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 60s as a psychedelic cult classic for the same subversive scene that also enjoyed Alice In Wonderland and the official drug of finding hidden meaning in children’s films, LSD. Fantasia has truthfully had fans consistently since then, but the question must be asked: how far can Fantasia be considered an abstract masterpiece when it retained such ugly racial stereotypes, and Disney has not addressed or resolved this issue? It succeeds where it challenges the boundaries of children’s films, but fails where it upholds the boundaries of race relations at that time—both regressive and ahead of its time.

Town versus gown: a view from the fence of the age-old divide

Michael Jacobs
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0
Town versus gown: a view from the fence of the age-old divide

Coming to Oxford was an overwhelming experience of excruciating pain, tears and much fussing around me; so much of all this that I hardly remember it. I am of course referring to my birth, as it is since then that I have lived, and later studied here. Even for a child, Oxford is an easy city to navigate, its main sites rarely straying far from the cross roads around which it revolves. A lot of students who already live here will therefore never enjoy the charm of being lost that must befall new students of larger cities. This is exacerbated by the fact that the University is such an inescapable part of the city centre.

Go abroad, and the global recognition of your hometown can be bizarre, given that it’s almost small enough to know someone every few streets. Even stranger, can be people’s impressed reactions and assumptions that merely living here should entail a pompous attitude. To an extent, familiarity with the city is an advantage in applying, potentially offsetting feelings of intimidation that others might experience when confronted with the density of medieval buildings and sneering gargoyles.

Living here can also teach you that playing the student isn’t so hard to master—a bold walk through a college door almost always gets you free entrance, while seeing students dumbly staggering the streets on a night out does wonders to eliminate the mystique around entry requirements. Yet I’m not without jealousy for those whose hometowns are so different that for them living here is ‘like living in a cake.’ As both a resident and a student, even living right in the centre is not always enveloping enough to feel like I’m studying here. Rather than seeking to escape the bubble, as so many understandably do, remaining absorbed in it is all the more important. When work finishes for the week, a torrent of student events and extra-curricular activities seems preferable to the stagnant feeling that living in college is like being on some strange residential in your own town. So long as you keep moving, you can outpace your sense of place.

Of course, different sides to the city are seen, as you start getting to know it inside out, from lakes and deer parks you didn’t know existed, to underground college bars. Studying with people who are new to the city also lends some novelty to the experience, as the religion of Burning Down the House replaces town traditions such as the Purple Turtle nativity, whereby in a cleansing and invigorating rite, the hole in the wall of PT becomes a portal through which friends are posted headfirst. Similarly, Lola Lo had never before been a place for buying drinks, only a dance space to return to after serving shots from a gin bottle hidden in the graveyard outside. Neither had I before known friends pretentious enough to commit a French pun in calling it “grave” drinking.

But for all its drawbacks and questionable consequences, my experience of studying in the town I live in has shown me that the town and gown divide generally seems to exist more as a consequence of the fact that the lives of students are inevitably structured differently to those at school or with jobs, than out of any mutual hostility or snobbery. Yet the difference is still there, and when leaving the city centre after the end of term I’m always a little surprised to see that Oxford exists, even when the student bubble has burst.

Grappling with graffiti

Jorge Lopez Llorente
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0
Grappling with graffiti

Our eyes take reality for granted, because a street tends to be just a street, a wall just a wall and so on. We know where things are meant to be, and orient ourselves accordingly. Sometimes, however, we shouldn’t be so sure. Art, even if it’s in the corner of our eye, beckons with mindblowing colours and perspectives, especially when artists play with optical illusions, bending limitations.

Artists have been questioning not only our thoughts but also our sight with optical illusions for a long time, although contemporary artists are experimenting with them like never before. These techniques can be classed as Op-Art (an obvious play on Pop Art), in which Victor Vasarely’s straightforward and stylish illusions stand out. They can also be called 3D illusions or, if you want to be ambiguous and sophisticated, trompe l’œil effects or even magical realism. The question artists working in this medium ask is why just reflect when you can refract? Why categorise when you can twist or blur or blend?

Playing with kaleidoscopes is seen as something that only children do (the exception being parents playing with their little ones), but the visual ‘magic’ it creates is highly sophisticated: it ought to be for everyone. Far beyond the funny but banal kaleidoscopic camera eff ect on tablets or phones that we have, optical illusions (the most powerful form of this ‘magic’), give artists the power to create something visually arresting. Hans Holbein the Younger already showed some optical acrobatics in ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533) by painting what seems an awkwardly deformed bone that can only be identified better as a skull from a certain angle or, ideally, from its reflection on a spoon.

Modern artists don’t mix angles or twist reality and illusion with spoons anymore (fun as that may be). A master in drugging our sight for us to see blurry psychedelia clearly and colourfully is Rob Gonsalves. In his painting, ‘Monks’, for example, your eyes rest on clear lines and soft distinct colours as your sight wanders across the painting. But then you bump into some strange figure, an ethereal monk where before there were and should still be clouds seen through a gap between arches. Is it one or the other? Perhaps both! There is no clear-cut reality. You don’t simply look at Gonsalves’ paintings as if they were flat screens: you peep into the paintings’ gaps, which are usually boring negative space that painters just ‘fill in’ after painting the important bits. They become a lens through which we can see varied patterns and details. Gonsalves’ art, as good as fairy tales, makes you return to the dreaminess of playing with kaleidoscopes and becoming a bit dizzy after using them for too long.

Others, like Patrick Hughes, still makes paintings you can hang on a wall, but craft 3D illusions in them. Hughes calls them ‘reversepectives’, reversing the normal perspective by painting objects in the distance on the parts which stick out more, closer to us.

Artistic optical illusions also fly from the museums to the streets. Graffiti is hardly startling for us now, of course, from the lowliest examples in alleys to Banksy’s art (which has recently been exhibited in Rome like traditional paintings). Instead of the usual graffiti on walls, optical illusions in streetart have jumped right off the pavement.

Julian Beever draws optical illusions on pavements with chalk and other artists like Edgar Mueller create similar effects with paint. Lakes, cliffs, even superheroes. It’s a breach of fantasy in our familiar reality, like Gonsalves’, which taps into our collective imagination with references to pop culture, as in Beever’s ‘Batman and Robin’.

Any passer-by can interact with the picture, stepping into it and then probably having a photo taken to post on Facebook, like the artists themselves do. In fact, they recommend it: the illusion works best from the right angle on a camera or phone. Beever and others use anamorphosis, the same trick Holbein the Younger applied, passing from a painting about noblemen to the ground under your feet.

If Oxford has the ‘dreaming spires’, Julian Beever has the ‘dreaming pavements’.

Politics has changed, now the left need to adapt in order to keep up

Fred Dimbleby
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1
Politics has changed, now the left need to adapt in order to keep up

If 2016 has shown anything, it is that politics is no longer about academics, policy or rationality but sentiment. It is no longer about what you are saying but how you say it.

We have seen it in the 2015 General Election when the Conservatives managed to convince the voters that Ed Miliband and Labour were in some way responsible for the international financial crisis. We saw it in the Brexit debate with the slogan “take back control”. We saw it in Trump’s winning ambition to “make America great again”.

The right has monopolised sloganised and demagogic politics and the left is being left behind. This is greatly regrettable as the right use this sloganised politics to inspire hatred and division, but the left needs to learn that this is the new game and need to adapt their manner of communication to ensure they take back the conversation and give hope to those who are not presently talked to and who tend to be manipulated by right wing leaders.

I know this is an irritatingly cynical and uninspiring message, but I see no other way for the left to gain power again. Sentiment and rhetoric are important. People need to feel that a political idea is going to work for them and they need an emotional appeal. They need a phrase that they can chant with thousands of others and will push them to spread the word about their candidate.

Maybe it is simply an innate problem with the nuances of left wing politics and its focus on solving problems rather than whipping up storms. It is very difficult to make a popular appeal for the introduction of Kenyesian economics, greater nationalisation or a diplomatic approach to an international disaster or terrorist attack when you come up against the easy and false solutions from the right of simply cutting tax, banning immigration or the invasion and bombing of a country.

The problem is that the left has forgotten how to communicate highly academic ideas to a public and voter group that does not have the time or energy to learn about them and to a press who prefers a catchy headline to a real debate. This is the new politics, the right is defining the debate, and if the left doesn’t catch up with them then they will continue unopposed and that is just a terrifying idea. The politics of policy is simply an ideal, long lost in our political system. The left needs to abandon its academic elitism and needs to bring its message to an audience that feel left behind.

Catchphrases, media characterisation of the opposition and the move away from simple factbased policy is the way forward for the left. This is a terrifying conclusion to come to as it questions the usefulness of politics in modern society. However, if the left wants to limit the hegemony of right wing leaders, then adapting their game is vital.

Where does America go from here?

Zoe Fannon
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0
Where does America go from here?

In the aftermath of this election, my thoughts are occupied by two questions. First, how did it happen; and second, what happens next.

We first must ask, how did Trump win? This is not the same as asking how the polls got the result ‘wrong’ – which is something of a red herring when most gave a sizeable approximately 20 per cent chance of a Trump victory. Instead, we want to know what the key factors that contributed to his win are. We are still waiting for a lot of the data that can answer this, but preliminary evidence suggests there are three important groups of voters to think about. First, the hardcore Trump supporters – people who are suffering economically and misidentify the causes and viable solutions, and the people who are just plain racist and take pleasure in the idea of kicking large groups out of the country.

But Trump’s low favorability ratings suggest that those who fully agree with him cannot entirely explain the result. We must consider a second group, the people who held their noses and voted for Trump. This is a diverse set of voters. It includes those who feel economically left behind, who do not support many of Trump’s racist or sexist views but are desperate for someone, anyone to take seriously their fears about their disappearing manufacturing and mining jobs. There are those who hold strong religious or moral convictions and couldn’t bear the idea of a liberal Supreme Court; and those who feel that everything they know is being swept away by a cosmopolitan, globalist, multicultural tidal wave and that while they don’t want to deport all the Muslims per se, they do not want to lose the white privilege they have held for so long.

A third and final group to consider is those who didn’t vote: those (hopefully not too numerous) who wouldn’t vote for Hillary because she was not progressive enough; those at the political centre who felt she was too left-wing (or too female…) but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump either; and those who couldn’t vote because the time cost of voting is too high. This is a broad swathe of people with very different motivations, with no silver bullet alteration that would have led all of them to change their behaviour.

The second question is, what happens next? How much damage can be done by a President Trump and a Republican congress? My biggest concerns relate to climate change, the ideological direction of the USA, and the globalization project more broadly. It is alarming that the stated position of the incoming leader of one of the world’s largest energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters is that climate change is a fabrication, or at the very most a wildly exaggerated phenomenon that we don’t really need to worry about. The pace of political development to combat climate change is already too slow relative to the environmental changes we are seeing, and we do not have the time to delay any action by four years (at least).

Ideologically, it has felt in recent years that the USA was on a path to becoming a society that could embrace and encourage true diversity. We have seen more women in the upper echelons of power structures, from the Federal Reserve to the Supreme Court and even the presidential race. The voices of people of colour have become louder, demanding that the country take note of the structural racism that they continue to struggle against on a daily basis. Gay couples finally won the right to marry. And yet today it seems that, for far more of the population than any of us had wanted to believe, this is not the direction they want to see the USA going. Even if not all of those who voted for Trump are as racist and sexist as he is, they were insufficiently repulsed by him to withdraw their support. For those who are members of the minority groups he has threatened, this is a cause for genuine fear.

The movement away from globalization is also a serious concern for me. The economic benefits of trade are clear, although it is equally clear that not enough has been done to ensure they are shared. But beyond that, I had hoped that increasing interconnectedness would over time bring about a more global sense of identity and a sense of shared responsibility and mutual obligation to citizens of other countries. The “my country first” mentality that Trump directly endorsed in his acceptance speech makes this a more distant dream.

But what happens next is not only about what Trump does; it is about what other Americans and I do in response. Increased political engagement is vital – we must vote in the midterm elections, and put pressure on our congressional representatives (Republican and Democratic) and state and local governments. We can also continue to vote with our wallets and feet. Concern about climate change and global responsibility can be manifested through conscious consumerism as well as giving support in the form of either money or time to relevant action groups. We must also stand up and be counted in the defence of those for whom Trump’s victory is a direct threat to their right to live in the USA free of persecution. Democracy – the rule of the people – is about more than ticking a box once every four years, and now more than ever we must step up to that responsibility.

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